How to Purify Tap Water
How to purify tap water! That’s a question a lot of people are asking these days. And it makes sense with all of the news about pesticides and prescription drugs in our water. If you’re at all interested in your health and well-being, you need to purify your water. It’s just a matter of which of the many water purification systems to buy.
Water purification systems break out into roughly four types: reverse osmosis systems, distillers, ultraviolet light purifiers, and carbon/ceramic filters. Each of these has its strong point and weak points. Let’s discuss these.
How to Purify Tap Water with Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis is very popular. Although, its popularity seems to be lessening somewhat recently. It works by pressuring the water to be filtered through a micro-porous membrane. The holes in the membrane are so small that only the water molecules make their way through. The contaminants are left on the other side.
As far as a filter, reverse osmosis works well. It will filter everything from cysts to pesticides out of your water. It does, however, have two problems. The biggest issue is that it’s really, really wasteful. You can waste from three to ten gallons of water for every clean gallon that gets filtered–that’s according to the make an model. You see not all the water makes it through the membrane. As a matter of fact, most of it doesn’t. The rest goes down the drain. The other issue is that it demineralizes the water. That is it takes out trace minerals like calcium and potassium. We need those minerals to be healthy!
How to Purify Tap Water with Distillers
Distillers work by heating up the water, then letting it condense in a clean receptacle. A lot of people consider distillers the gold standard of water purification, but I’m not so sure. Distillers don’t work well with chlorinated water. And since virtually all tap water is chlorinated, that’s a big negative for home use. Also, distillers are up to ten times as expensive to buy as other types of filters, which do an equally good job. Distillers also have more parts than these other methods, so there’s more stuff to break.
How to Purify Tap Water with UV and Carbon/Ceramic Filters
UV, or ultraviolet light is used to kill living contaminants like bacteria, viruses, and microorganisms. It does this very well, too! UV is cost effective. The issue with UV and tap water is that, although you can certainly have contamination by microorganisms like giardia and cryptosporidium, it’s really non-living contamination you’re worried about–stuff like asbestos, lead, chlorine…that sort of thing. UV would probably be better for something like well water.
Carbon/ceramic filtering systems are probably your best bet for filtering tap water. They’re cost effective, easy to install and use, and they take only a small amount of maintenance. (You have to change the filter every six months or so.) The technology that’s used with these filters is quite astounding! Good filtering systems can filter out both living and non-living contamination, and leave in those all important trace minerals I mentioned a while back.
To my mind the answer to the question of how to purify tap water is…carbon/ceramic filters. They’re the best!
By: R. Lee Cole
About the Author:
To learn more about home water purifiers, visit my website!
R. Lee Cole is an avid health and exercise enthusiast who loves to make his research available to everyone via the Internet. Check out Lee’s website for more information about this important topic.